The present invention relates to I.S. (individual section) machines which transform gobs of molten glass into bottles in a two step process.
A state of the art I.S. machine is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,902,320. Such an I.S. (individual section) machine has a plurality of identical sections (a section frame in which and on which are mounted a number of section mechanisms) each of which has a blank station which receives one or more gobs of molten glass and forms them into parisons having a threaded opening at the bottom (the finish) and a blow station which receives the parisons and forms them into bottles standing upright with the finish at the top.
An invert and neck ring holder mechanism which includes an opposed pair of arms, rotatable about an invert axis, carries the parisons from the blank station to the blow station, inverting the parisons from a finish down to a finish up orientation in the process.
The blank station includes opposed pairs of blankmolds and the blow station includes opposed pairs of blowmolds. The blankmolds and the blowmolds are supported on inserts carried by opposed carriers, each of which may be advanced by a servo motor or the like between open (separated) and closed positions.
During machine start up, the parisons formed in the blank station are not fit for further processing in the blow molds and must be removed from the machine. An operator conventionally must grab the parisons and remove them from the section. This puts the operator face to face with molten glass parisons until the blank side has heated up sufficiently to form parisons which can be formed into bottles at the blow station. This is a very undesirable period of time for the operator.
In the early 80""s a prototype variation of an I.S. machine was built which had a rotating blow mold assembly which had two blow mold stations which sequentially received parisons from a single blank mold. This concept is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,343,644. The invert mechanism for that machine is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,612,032. In that machine parisons could be dumped by positioning the invert at a 90xc2x0 orientation and dropping the parisons into a parison catching device which is lowered into position extending partially over the invert and which discharges the parisons into a cullet chute having an opening defined in the top of the section large enough to accept vertically oriented parisons.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved system for removing parisons from an I.S. machine.